


solace in the poppy

by tea_tales_and_whales



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, M/M, gratuitous use of opium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 05:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7300597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tea_tales_and_whales/pseuds/tea_tales_and_whales
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Treavor's hunting accident and Wallace's consequent confession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	solace in the poppy

He wakes up to the underside of the canopy above his bed at home. Well, not home home. Not Pendleton Hall in Dunwall, but Silvermire, their house out in the country. Harts shot through with glimmering thread twist and writhe on the heavy brocade, pursued by snarling hounds. There’s a dull screaming radiating from his right side, but somehow everything is soft and muzzy, like so much muslin wadded in front of his eyes and nose.

There’s a beautiful woman sitting at his bedside like a child, one leg pulled onto the chair with her, her arms around it, and her chin propped on her knee. Terrible and prophetic, she’s ghostly pale in the dawn light filtering in through the one open window, mouth thin and trembling. The rest of the room swims in shadow and she appears like the moon on a starless night, cold and ethereal. Her hair has come loose, spiralling down around her delicate throat and draped over her shoulder. Even if his chest weren’t leaden, sparking small fires with each inhale, he thinks he might have trouble breathing anyway to see her so painfully lovely. His eyes sting and his vision blurs.

He tries her name, but his tongue feels like an unhewn wooden block, and everything is sluggish and clumsy. Her eyes are red as they turn on him. 

“Idiot,” she hisses, voice crackling like the fire in his chest, burning down his cheeks in hot, wet, trails. “You’re such a fucking idiot.”

He wants to cry. What has he done? Doesn’t she know he’d do anything for her?

The report of a gun cracks dimly beyond the window, shattering over the grey, weatherbitten stone of Silvermire. Treavor thinks of partridges and pheasants taking to the sky in feathered panic, dropping like dead flies onto the dinner table. Alone, the nervous anticipation - there are boar in these woods still and the last groundskeeper was gutted by a stag - rises like high tide. The holding of breath and the slender shivering of leaves, a trunk against his back as he sucks in rosewater smoke, adjusting his unused gun on his hip. The sky muted dove-grey hues, early mist wreathing the trees. Birdsong. The snap of twigs in the undergrowth. Antlers rising like spears from beyond the bramble thickets and the little bones of mice broken in the jaws of foxes half buried in the earth. The crack of a gun and the mulch of dead leaves pressed against his cheek, dirt in his open mouth, wet and rich. 

Waverly leans over him and her lips are cool against his fevered brow. “I’m leaving today. I’m going back to Dunwall.” 

“Who is he?” The sounds in his throat jar together but Treavor refers to the lover she has now, the one she has only hinted at during their intimate confidences but says no more than what’s needed to keep him churning with bitter longing. He wants - he needs - “Waverly -”

His fingers catch hers, or try to. They’re numb and unwieldy, like his mouth. Like everything. Were his words really words? Why is it so difficult to speak? He tries again and maybe she helps him because her hand is in his now and squeezing. He can’t feel her nails biting into his skin but they leave little purple crescent moons. 

“Don’t go - what if they -”

“Wallace is here,” she says softly and he doesn’t understand. Is she scolding him? Doesn’t she know Wallace understands how he and Waverly are together - that Wallace will take their confidences with him to the grave? There are no secrets from him because there’s no need -

Her hand slips away and he sinks into sleep and he wakes up again before his eyes open and someone he can’t see is brushing his hair back from his brow. Gentle continuous strokes, like petting a cat or soothing a child, Treavor thinks. Not that he really knows anything at all about the latter. The touch is almost unbearable because what if it stops? He cannot get used to it. 

The hand moves away and Treavor wants to tell it to come back. He whimpers instead. The hand doesn’t resume petting him but traces over the shell of his ear and curls protectively around the back of his neck and rests there. It’s nice and Treavor doesn’t know what he’ll do if it leaves. There’s no guarantee whimpering will keep it with him. He remembers catching moths as a child and holding them carefully in the cage of his closed hands and how they crawled over his fingers and made him giggle until he let them go. He goes to put his hand over the one on his neck but the movement rakes him with pain, searing through his fraught nerves.

He gasps and his eyes open and it’s still dawn or, at least, it’s dawn again. Perhaps it will be dawn forever more. There are worse times of the day. Everything is quiet at dawn, and still, all still sleeping. It carries the sopor of the long night gone as it wearily pulls on brighter garb for the day. Treavor has seen plenty of dawns, slipping out from between rumpled sheets, quickly pulling on clothes without a valet’s aid, before swallowing shame and the first drink of the morning in the railcar home. 

Wallace is sitting on the edge of the bed in his waistcoat and shirt sleeves. It’s his hand, warm and calloused, which draws away as though from a frightened rabbit.

“You’ve had a bit of an accident, milord,” Wallace tells him, and he sound strange. Hoarse and far away. Floating up in the canopy and looking down at himself, Treavor sees what he means, what with the general sheen of sweat on his shaking body and the thick swathes of bandages plastered from hip to halfway up his ribcage. They look soft and snowy white where there is no black-red welling up from beneath like a dark, menacing shadow under the surface of the sea. He’d like to stay drifting but pain snags him like a harpoon, drags him down amid the sheets and he could writhe like a captured leviathan if he didn’t know it would hurt all the more.

He recognises the bottle of laudanum on the nightstand and sighs, reaching, but Wallace easily halts his hand with his own.

“The doctor said not to dose you with any more than he prescribed. Even if you demanded. Even if you begged.”

Treavor is seven again and throwing a tantrum, howling from inside the prison of his heavy and bleeding body. His eyes burn with mutiny. He spits out each word like a gobbet of blood and bile, teeth slick with awful, desperate rage. 

“Give. It.” 

Wallace holds his hand still with no effort, simply grasping it between his own. Treavor would struggle harder if he didn’t feel like a butterfly pinned inside a glass case. 

“Think of your father,” Wallace says, and his words are a gavel of condemnation, cold and final, as terrible as a decree from the Litany. Treavor does and the fight seeps out of his bones, leaving him limp against the bed. Yellowed, papery skin, withered limbs, and hollowed eyes is what the departed soul of the late Lord Pendleton left behind, flesh and blood imbued with the reek of poppy. The cremators had to be careful of the fumes when they burned him.

“It hurts,” Treavor whines, grinding his teeth at the pulse and throb of gritty heat under his skin. Drawing breath to talk is agony. He wants to scream but that will only make it worse. The empty pit of his stomach shudders and heaves uselessly as pain and retreat and pain chase each other in an endless cycle.

“I know. I know.” Wallace’s thumb trembles against Treavor’s wrist. The line of his back is bowed like a weeping willow, exhaustion sunken deep beneath his eyes. He hasn’t shaved.

“Wallace -” 

“You need to rest, milord.” There’s an odd catch in his voice, like the click of a key in a lock. Treavor doesn’t remember what it means that Wallace’s eyes are shiny. He’s too exhausted to move but his hand is already in Wallace’s so he doesn’t have to overexert himself reaching. There are fresh new scratches on his wrists and upper arms - did he try to catch himself falling? - overlaying the countless scars he’s clawed there himself when the worst of the skin rashes drove him to frenzy. 

Wallace’s lips are dry where they press against the backs of Treavor’s knuckles, but there’s something wet dripping onto them. Wallace’s exhale shudders painfully. He’s crying. Treavor has never seen him cry before. Only reddened eyes hours after cremating his mother, years ago. Treavor toasted to her memory with brandy then, because he didn’t think it right to let a man - one he called “friend” as a boy when he was too young to know better - grieve without some show of support. Watching Wallace cry is like watching the mighty face of a mountain crack and come tumbling down into boulders and pebbles and Treavor can’t imagine what’s the matter until a horrible thought comes drifting out of the laudanum fog.

“Am I dying, Wallace?” he croaks, fearfully. Wallace can only shake his head. His shoulders are shaking too. Treavor’s throat tightens and he fears Wallace is lying to him. No, Wallace wouldn’t lie to him. Wallace keeps Treavor’s secrets and conceals none of his own. “Then why?” Treavor asks like a bewildered child. His free hand plucks Wallace’s sleeve feebly and it’s like he’s pulled on an invisible puppeteer’s string. Wallace straightens, dragging a handkerchief over his cheeks, and already he looks much more composed. His voice even approaches steady. 

“I am only being monstrously inappropriate. Don’t pay me any mind. Try to sleep, my rabbit -” Wallace bites his tongue and falls silent. He has the look of a man furious with himself. Treavor would recognise it for something he knows all too well within himself but he is too busy peering into the distant past.

“My nurse told me that was something my mother used to call me.”

“Rabbit? Yes. Because you used to wrinkle your nose at her when she watched you sleeping in your crib, she said.”

“I thought I was your lord, not your rabbit. Do you think me a child, Wallace?”

Perhaps he sounds petulant. Even angry. Frowning, Wallace drops his gaze to where he is still holding Treavor’s hand. The hand he has kissed and wept upon. Treavor briefly, viciously, thinks about snatching it away. That will teach him.

“You were five days old when they put you in my arms. A complete accident. Never should have happened. An absolute breach of propriety - your nurse ought to have been sacked on the spot without references - but you wouldn’t stop crying, your mother was insensate, and the nurse was at her wits’ end. She brought you below stairs in search of brandy to quiet you. My father and I were in the servant’s dining hall polishing the silver when she came down. She handed you to me while she and my father searched for the brandy, him scolding her all the while, and you were so small and frightfully blue, I feared to hold you too tightly. Do you know what you did?”

Treavor has never heard this story before. He can’t really shake his head for the weight of it but Wallace continues anyway. 

“You squirmed and made such a fuss for a few minutes until I told you you were making an awful racket and it wasn’t befitting a noble lordling. You quieted down then and fell asleep against my chest. Never have I listened so intently for the sound of another being breathing. It sounded like you struggled those first few days but you made it.”

Oh, hasn’t that always been Treavor’s curse? 

“And then you grew up and my father told me to keep an eye on you and to do as you pleased, because being in your favour would be how I rose to a position like my father’s one day. My mother took me aside when you were five, after your brothers - well - she pleaded with me to watch over you because you were so small and your lady mother’s favourite, but her Ladyship was always so delicate and coughed so violently during the colder months, and my mum couldn’t bear to think of you growing up without someone to care for you. Nor could I really.” Wallace’s eyes meet his. Something surges forward in his voice like it’s been long kept chained up. “My lord or my rabbit, you have always been mine. Mine, unlike your brothers, unlike anyone ever has been or ever will be. Mine like you have only ever been mine and your mother’s.”

The composure Wallace so desperately pulled together and hastily sewed comes apart at the seams. 

“They carried you in- I was down in the kitchens when I heard - Vivian came down shrieking - I haven’t - I don’t even remember running, milord - they brought you through the entrance hall and you were so pale. You weren’t moving and the blood - Outsider’s Eyes, look at you Treavor. No one so thin and fine-boned should bleed that much - no one could and live. I thought - Ward us all. I thought -”

Treavor is bad at comforting people. He doesn’t know how. He was never taught. A pat on the back, a few murmured platitudes, the offer of a drink is all he can really offer at any time, but not now. He can’t really move and his tongue can only manage monosyllables with anything close to ease. The laudanum is off the table; Treavor’s going to need that later. But Wallace is silently sobbing, hand clamped over his own mouth to keep from making an undignified display. He won’t be able to stop any time soon. Treavor knows this. Maybe Wallace is made of sterner stuff than he, but then Treavor is made of sterner stuff than he was when he was a child, yet he still hasn’t figured out how to stop crying before he’s ready to stop.

He tries squeezing Wallace’s hand, profoundly glad he didn’t act on the previous impulse to vindictively pull away. It probably won’t make a difference. Really, Wallace likely expects him to fall asleep again, and the prospect is an attractive one. Treavor’s eyelids droop, but he can’t help but to think of all the times he ever wished he didn’t have to exist because everything was too painful, or too exhausting, or simply too much, that he would have liked someone simply to sit with him - pull him close perhaps - show him he wasn’t someone whose touch was to be reviled at worst and merely tolerated at best. 

Somehow, he manages to get a fistful of Wallace’s sleeve. He’s determined not to let go of it because he can’t muster the strength for a tug, but an insistent pull might get him what he wants.

“I’m not a child but - I - will you -?” Treavor makes a low, sharp noise of frustration, not knowing how to ask for this. Wallace’s eyes are red and his expression is confused behind the tears. Treavor rolls his knuckles against Wallace’s forearm, scowling with the effort, inches his fingers up and over until he’s brushing them against Wallace’s chest, and Wallace finally seems to understand what is desired of him. Treavor braces for a refusal, shoulders hunching inward, but it ends up being adequate preparation for when Wallace simply reaches for him and pulls him into his arms. He shifts slowly and adjusts them both until Treavor fits against Wallace like the space was made for him all along. 

“Ow,” he mumbles against Wallace throat, dizzy with exertion and flinching from the needling between his ribs. Wallace smells like a man who has lived in the same clothes for the last few days, old sweat and snatched fragments of sleep, but still enough like himself - soap and silver polish and baking bread. Treavor closes his eyes and sinks against him as heavily as he did against the bed. It hurt to move but not so badly as he thought it might. Perhaps the laudanum really is dulling most of the pain. 

Wallace apologises softly. He sounds like a man who wants to honestly regret what he has done, regret what suffering he has caused, but the suffering is all too brief and he’s too satisfied with the results to do so. There’s some guilt there for that. He feels - well, Treavor’s brow is feverishly hot, but the rest of him is cold and clammy with sweat, and Wallace’s hands feel like a window of sunlight poured onto a wooden floor, run across in barefeet, like a mug of tea and whiskey steaming into cold air. He’s being very careful not to touch the side of Treavor that is wrapped up in bandages. He has one arm around Treavor’s back, that hand tracing idle patterns into Treavor’s shoulder with his thumb. The other is settled on Treavor’s knee.

It should rankle, being held like this - he’s a man grown for fuck’s sake - but this isn’t how one holds a child. Holding a child requires blocking out the world for them for a time, holding them only as tightly as needed to give comfort, or so Treavor has rarely observed over the years. Certainly, the way Wallace holds him is so that Treavor can ignore everything beyond the circle of his arms, but there’s something in the way Wallace’s hands knot into Treavor’s nightshirt and how he buries his face in Treavor’s hair, as though needily grasping at comfort for himself. Treavor lets him and weakly twitches his fingers against Wallace’s back, attempting a consoling caress.

If Treavor falls asleep like this, feeling honestly safe like he hasn’t in years and years, he doesn’t remember doing so. He doesn’t remember much of anything but the haze of opium.


End file.
